------------------------------------The Web's wizard of working together

By Mike Rogoway
The OregonianDecember 19, 2005

Ward Cunningham often spends mornings by himself in his 16th-floor office in the U.S. Bancorp Tower overlooking Northwest Portland. But he's never alone.

Arrayed before him are a pair of computer screens filled with online chats, e-mails and masses of computer code. He's on the phone by 6 a.m., calling around the globe to rally support for a consortium promoting one type of open source software.

An old-growth timber of the Silicon Forest, gray-bearded Cunningham is an engineer by training and a networker by nature. The gregarious 56-year-old has dedicated his career to creating technologies that connect people.

His best-known innovation is the wiki, a type of Web site he created 10 years ago that invites users to add, correct or delete information as they see fit. Wikis work on the theory that collective knowledge is more powerful and authoritative than individual knowledge. Cunningham considers them his biggest success.

"It's what they'll put on my gravestone, I'm sure," he said.

Long an idealistic flame flickering in obscure corners of the Internet, wikis now shine brightly across the Web, thanks to Wikipedia, a phenomenally popular -- and sometimes controversial -- online encyclopedia inspired by Cunningham's work.

Though not directly involved with Wikipedia, Cunningham is a sort of intellectual godfather to a burgeoning movement of Web-based communities. Back in Oregon full time this fall after two unsatisfying years at Microsoft, he remains unabashedly optimistic about the power of people working together and how technology expands those possibilities.

"Sometimes when you collaborate, you have to trust people more than you have any reason to do so," he said. "It works because most people are good."

Cunningham's workday is usually bookended by 45 minutes on a Trek mountain bike as he rides between his downtown office and the Garden Home neighborhood where he lives west of Portland.

Photo by Ross William HamiltonWard Cunningham, at home with his son Chris in 2005

His house is given over to technology, with Mac laptops scattered across the living room like magazines. Every member of the family has a Web site -- even Jasper, the cat -- and two computer servers run a wireless home network that connects everything.

No one has ever counted, but Cunningham estimates that there are at least a dozen computers stashed in nooks around the house. That's three for each person in the family -- four, if you don't count his son, Pat, who moved to Eugene two years ago to attend the University of Oregon.

His family's history began in 1977, when Cunningham and his future wife, Karen, were grad students in Purdue University's computer science program. Their romance began at a party he threw after an especially difficult midterm.

Her husband has always been social, said Karen Cunningham, a member of the Beaverton School Board. She said he's especially interested in meeting people who challenge his thinking or inspire his intellectual curiosity.

"His real focus for quite some time has been around community and ways to use technology to reach out and build community," she said.

Cunningham first came to Oregon from his native Indiana in 1978 to work at Tek Labs, Tektronix Inc.'s once-storied -- and now disbanded -- research unit. Attracted in part by the Oregon mystique that followed the Tom McCall era, Cunningham said, he found the state a welcoming place for "ordinary" people like him.

Robert Daasch, then a graduate student and now a Portland State University professor, met Cunningham in 1982. The two developed a bond that grew from working through the computing puzzles they each encountered professionally in the years since, Daasch said.

Cunningham has an unusual capacity for distilling complex problems to their essence, Daasch said, and seeing the common threads in people's thinking. Daasch said his friend enjoys working a room, and his outgoing personality stands out in the notoriously asocial computer world.

"He very much enjoys the company of people, and I would say he also enjoys getting people to talk amongst themselves," Daasch said. "That is quite distinct from many engineers."

At Tek Labs, and later in the consulting business he and his wife run, Cunningham said, he's always been interested in exchanging ideas. Instead of trying to answer a specific computing question, he likes to explore a concept for its own sake -- without knowing where it will lead.

"I find programming for the purpose of learning is easy," he said. "I'll write a program in the same way that a chemist might run an experiment. I'm doing it for the sake of learning.

"Sometimes my experiments turn out to be good enough that they (become) a product," he said. "That's what happened with wiki."

In 1995, Cunningham was promoting a new strategy for computer programming he'd developed called software patterns, looking for common threads in computer code. At the same time, friends introduced him to early versions of the World Wide Web.

To advance his research, Cunningham created a Web site he called the WikiWikiWeb -- named for the Wiki Wiki shuttles he saw during vacation at the Honolulu airport. Cunningham posted software patterns on the site and invited friends and collaborators to do the same, making changes based on their own work.

A community of users formed around the WikiWikiWeb, Cunningham said, with common ideas and interests. For that reason, they promoted each other's work instead of challenging it.

That concept slowly spread across the Web, and sites based on Cunningham's model became known as wikis. The distinguishing feature of every wiki, Cunningham said, is a community of supporters who focus on the site as a forum for communicating in the group.

"It is, in its simplest form, a site that respects the intellectual creativity of the reader," Cunningham said. "It says this person reading this site could know something that I don't know. And when they know it, if they're willing to give it, we're willing to take it. It says, 'We're having a conversation.' "

Wikipedia, founded in early 2001, took Cunningham's insight and became a sensation. By some measures, it's one of the 30 most-visited English-language Web sites.

But its success brought new scrutiny to the wiki concept, and some setbacks. Last month, for example, a onetime aide to Robert Kennedy was outraged when a Wikipedia entry -- soon exposed as a hoax -- linked him to both Kennedy assassinations.

The episode received national attention and underscored how easy it is for users, who can change Wikipedia at will, to exploit the site to spread false information.

To Cunningham, though, focusing on the occasional malicious act overlooks the site's greater successes. Wikipedia is fragile, he concedes, but it works much more often than not because of the good will of people who use it.

"I could build a house out of wood and nobody comes and burns it down," he said. "Isn't that cool? And that's what our culture is built on. It's that trust.

"And of course there are people who do burn down wooden buildings," he said. "As a society, we have to deal with that, but if that's all we think about then we've given up on creativity."

Wikis found early acceptance in another online community dedicated to exchanging information, the open-source movement. Software developers who share their work openly and give it away found wikis a natural place to pool information.

So some were astonished in 2003 when Cunningham accepted a job at Microsoft, a company reviled among many open-source enthusiasts for its proprietary approach to software development.

To Cunningham, Microsoft was simply an opportunity to expand his thinking and test new ideas.

"I needed to go into an unfamiliar environment and make it familiar," he said.

For almost two years, Cunningham split his time between Redmond, Wash., and Portland, spending alternate weeks on Microsoft's campus developing software patterns like the ones he studied in the 1990s. He learned a lot, Cunningham said, but felt frustrated trying to fit into Microsoft's well-established culture.

"I thought I would learn faster, and it's a very complicated company," he said. "There's a lot of tradition there, and I just wasn't a part of it."

So Cunningham came back to Oregon and into a much more natural setting working for the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit group based in Canada that is trying to develop common foundations for software programming worldwide. Cunningham's job in Eclipse's two-man Portland office is to encourage communication among the group's most dedicated programmers.

It's the logical extension of what's come before, an opportunity to apply what wikis have taught him about online communities. Encouraging people to collaborate has become a mission, Cunningham said, an expression of his philosophy that they'll do more together than they could on their own.

"At the limits of your creativity is where I like to be," Cunningham said, "helping people go a little further."